Read Chapter 28: The Apothecary's Son

The shop sat at the end of a crooked lane off the Rue Saint-Denis, its sign still hanging by a single iron nail: *L'Étoile d'Or*. Marguerite read the words twice, then glanced at Beaumont. The windows were boarded, the door padlocked, and the smell of burnt herbs still clung to the air like a ghost.

"La Reynie's men did their work thoroughly," Beaumont murmured, adjusting the collar of his plain wool coat. They were dressed as provincial kin—he a weary merchant uncle, she his quiet niece, come to Paris on family business. No one looked twice at them. No one looked at anyone in Paris these days, not with the Chambre Ardente burning bright with accusations.

Marguerite stepped closer to the door and pressed her palm to the wood. "There may be a rear entrance."

They found it at the end of a narrow passage—a service door, warped and ill-fitting. Beaumont produced a small iron pick from his sleeve and worked the lock with practiced patience. The door swung inward on a kitchen choked with overturned pots and shattered glass.

The shop proper was worse. Shelves had been pulled from the walls, their contents crushed underfoot. Mortars lay cracked in corners. A fine dust of dried petals and powdered roots coated every surface. But Marguerite's eye went not to the destruction but to what remained standing: a single tall cabinet, its back panel freshly splintered.

Someone else had been here.

"Beaumont," she said, her voice low. She gestured to the cabinet. He crossed to it and knelt, running his fingers along the exposed gap. The splinters were pale and fresh, the wood still weeping sap.

"Within the hour," he said. "Maybe less."

"La Reynie's men, or the ring's?"

Before he could answer, a sound came from the front of the shop—a key scraping at the lock. Marguerite pulled Beaumont behind the counter, pressing them both into shadow. The padlock clattered. The door creaked open.

A boy entered. Fourteen, perhaps, with his father's thin shoulders and a face smudged with soot. He carried a small burlap sack and moved with a furtive, animal wariness, his eyes scanning the wreckage as though expecting an ambush. When he saw the splintered cabinet, he let out a choked noise and sank to his knees.

"My father's books," he whispered. "They took his books."

Marguerite made a decision. She rose from behind the counter, hands open and visible. The boy scrambled back, dropping the sack, his face going white with terror.

"Please—I've nothing—I'm not part of it—"

"Peace," Marguerite said, keeping her voice soft as she approached. He was skinny under his coarse shirt, and his wrists showed the yellow-green bruising of recent restraint. La Reynie's men had questioned him, then. He'd survived. That meant he either knew nothing or knew how to hold his tongue. "I'm not with the police. I knew you practiced here. I came to see if the shop was truly empty, or if there was anything left worth salvaging."

The boy's jaw tightened. "You came to steal."

"I came to find the truth." She crouched at his level. "My name is Marguerite. I was lady's maid to the Duchesse de Montfort. You've heard what they say of us?"

His eyes went wide, but he did not run. The streets were full of names—the Duchesse's name was on every lip, cursed or praised depending on the quarter. This boy had been raised in a shop that served both sides of the law; he knew which names carried weight.

"You're the one they're hunting," he said. "The one they say poisoned the Comtesse."

"The Comtesse poisoned herself. And many others." Marguerite let that sit. "Your father kept a ledger. A record of every poison he sold and to whom. That ledger was hidden in a false book—I was told. But I see the cabinet is broken, and no book remains."

The boy's face closed like a fist. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'm not here to condemn your father," she pressed. "He was caught in a trap larger than himself. But that ledger can prove who truly leads the ring. It can clear my mistress's name and send the real guilty party to the Chambre Ardente."

The boy stared at her. His mouth worked, chewing his lip. From the front of the shop, a cart rumbled past, and he flinched at the noise.

"The men who came before you," he said at last. "They tore the shop apart looking for it. They said my father had confessed it was here. But my father never told them the way he told me—because he never got the chance. They hanged him at dawn."

Marguerite felt the weight of the boy's grief pressing against her own. She thought of her mother's unread letter, still folded in her pocket beneath her clothes, warm with the heat of her body. She had not dared to open it, not yet, not while her own life hung by a thread. But this boy had no such luxury. His grief was raw, unmended, still bleeding.

"You're his son," she said gently. "You know where he kept it."

The boy's chin lifted. "And if I do? What is it worth to you?"

Beaumont stepped forward from the shadows, and the boy tensed again. But Beaumont only produced a small leather purse and tossed it—the boy caught it with both hands, too proud to let it fall.

"Twenty livres," Beaumont said. "A start. There will be more when we have the book."

The boy weighed the purse in his palm. His eyes flicked to Marguerite, measuring her. She held his gaze, unblinking.

"It wasn't in the cabinet," he said finally. "Father was cleverer than these fools. He kept it in a false book on the shelf, yes—but not one so grand as the cabinet. He said that when men searched, they looked where they themselves would hide things. So he hid it in plain sight." He rose and crossed to the ruined shelves, scanning the spines of a few dozen undamaged volumes. He pulled one free—a worn copy of *Le Jardinier François*, its leather cover cracked and undistinguished. He ran his thumb along the spine, and there was a soft click. The cover swung open on a hollowed compartment.

Inside lay a ledger bound in plain vellum, its pages dense with cramped handwriting.

Marguerite drew in a sharp breath. "May I see it?"

The boy clutched it to his chest. "No. You've seen enough. You'll have your chance when I've been paid properly."

"Properly?" Beaumont's voice cooled. "We've offered twenty livres and promise of more. That's a fortune for a boy with no shop and no trade."

"It's not worth the risk of my neck." The boy stepped backward toward the rear door. "These men who came before you—they knew my father was part of it. They'll come for me next. I need enough to leave Paris, to go somewhere they won't find me." He looked at Marguerite, and something in his face shifted—a calculation, a hard-won maturity. "You want this ledger badly. I saw it in your eyes. So I'll tell you my price. Fifty gold livres. In my hand, before the book leaves my sight."

"Fifty is beyond our means," Marguerite said, and it was near truth. Beaumont carried a purse, but it was lean—enough for food and lodgings, not fortunes. "Give us two days."

The boy shook his head. "One."

"Forty-eight hours, or you can find another buyer for a book that will hang anyone who touches it."

The standoff stretched. The boy's fingers tightened on the ledger, but he did not flee. He was young, and the truth of her words had landed: the book was poison in his hands, but only currency in hers.

"Two days," he conceded. "Meet me at the fountain at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at dusk. No one follows. If I see a single guard, I burn it, and you can dig through the ashes."

He was gone through the rear door before either of them could speak further.

Beaumont let out a long breath. "Where do we find fifty gold livres in forty-eight hours without raising the alarm?"

Marguerite's mind was already racing—her fingers brushing the seam of her pocket where her mother's letter lay. Who did she know in Paris who still owed her a debt of silence? Who among the high and mighty had secrets worth protecting?

And then, like a candle flaring, one name came to her. A minister's secretary who had once paid her coin to keep his moonlight assignation with a baroness's daughter from reaching the Duchesse's ears. He was not a great man, but he sat at the tables where great men spoke. And men who kept secret lovers kept secret accounts too.

"We find a way," she said. "The question isn't where the money will come from. It's what we're willing to do to earn it."

Beaumont's eyes met hers, and she saw in them the glimmer of the man he'd been at court—the one who had learned to read ambition in a single glance.

"Then we begin tonight," he said.